Ministry of Intrigue

It appears that I have written myself into a corner here.

When I first started this site back in 2004, I intended it just as a writing exercise. It was supposed to be a place where I would publish daily in order to build discipline as a writer. I had just completed a semester in the Undergraduate Nonfiction Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, and so a lot of my early entries were the sort of literary nonfiction that was emphasized in that program. It was originally an anonymous Blogspot site, so that I would write comfortably and without inhibition. It was a great exercise, and I wrote a few entries that I was proud of.

Eventually, I decided to drop the pseudonym. My friends had mostly figured out what I was up to, and the more I thought about the importance of owning your words, the sillier the idea of pseudonymous writing became. So I dropped the pseudonym and shortly afterwords purchased my domain name and set up a proper Wordpress installation. Everything was fine at first, but I found I slowly became more cautious in my writing. I’m not talking about the nastiness that usually begins to accompany anonymity (per this theory), but rather that I took less risks with my writing.

I began writing far more structured pieces, less personal and more review or tutorial oriented. Those pieces also attracted the most attention from other people, which encouraged me to write more posts in that vein. Because I am a geek, a lot of that writing was focused around tech topics, although I continued to review books and movies. I actively resisted the Ministry of Intrigue being classified as another “tech” site, although I was advised by several people online that the lack of focus made it difficult to get traffic. I also couldn’t control how other people described the site, and because I loved geeking out on technology, the “tech” label stuck.

Eventually I accepted it and while I occasionally covered other topics, I started thinking of the site as a place devoted to tech and even began describing it that way. At first this was just fine, because I love talking about technology and I’m into this stuff. However, over time I found that I was writing less and less, as I struggled with writing posts that did more than contribute to the echo-sphere.

A change was needed, and conveniently I had just discovered Django, so I rewrote my site using it. In part this was an exercise to learn the framework, partly to build a CMS tailored to my needs, and in part to procrastinate on writing content. Once the site was built, it allowed me to do link-blogging, which was a great way for me to do quick commentary on stories that came to my attention, without requiring the effort of writing a longer post. Writing longer posts requires a particular level interest on my part, and when possible I try to skip doing so for stories that have already been talked to death around the web.

Here’s the deal though: I never wanted to be a “tech blogger.”

I wrote myself into an unwanted pigeonhole, and I’ve been stuck in it for quite a while. Everybody knows that the only way out of any type of hole is to crawl out of it, and it’s high time that I do that. So, I’m going to start shifting the focus of this site, back to the more general category of “assorted geekery.” I’m sure there will still be plenty of tech stuff, because I’m interested in it, but I’m going to start writing more often on other topics as well, and hopefully get back to doing more pieces that flex the right side of my brain.

In addition to writing, I’m going to start doing some more mixed media stuff, in particular video, although I haven’t ruled audio out yet either. At some point I’ll redesign the site to highlight these new types of content, but for now I’ll just embed them inside of standard entries. I’m still primarily a writer, and unfamiliar with working in these other mediums, so expect plenty of false starts and sloppy beginnings, but over time I hope to improve. The first of these videos, being my awkward introduction to the format, in which I ironically spend a lot of time talking about my site in terms of covering tech, is embedded below.

I don’t know if this new direction is going to go anywhere, but hopefully by allowing myself to experiment and write more freely it will help the site to become more pure.

I hope you will join me on the journey.

This weekend I went to the Body Worlds exhibit at The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

For those of you unfamiliar with this particular exhibition, Body Worlds is the brainchild of anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who developed a process called plastination, that allows him to preserve bodies and tissues by replacing water and fat with certain types of plastics. The end result is that the specimens do not smell or decay, allowing detailed study for an extended period of time. Body Worlds is a series of traveling museum exhibitions of primarily human bodies that have been plastinated in such a way to reveal their anatomical structure and thus highlight how the body functions. In most cases, the skin has been removed to reveal the musculature underneath, and in many cases different parts of the body are opened or removed in order to expose or illustrate a particular function. In more extreme examples, the plastinate is reduced to a single system, such as showing just the nervous system or just the vascular system. More dramatic cross-sections also appear to better demonstrate how everything in the body goes together.

I am fascinated by biology and anatomy in particular, and quite happily spent two hours wandering through the exhibit. I was enthralled with getting an opportunity to see the human body up close in this way, being able to see the complex striations and texture of muscle tissue and how the flesh differs in the various parts of our body. It was also a treat to see the brain and nervous system up close, and how they connect to the rest of the structure that is the human form. It is funny how we have a tendency to hold an image of the brain as being far larger than it actually is, such that it is a bit of a surprise when you actually see an open skull. You look at the exposed brain and think, “Wow, that’s it? It’s so small!”

There are three roving exhibitions at the moment, and as I understand it there are plans for even more. Currently they are in Chicago, Dallas and Phoenix, and you can always find out where they are going next at the official site. If it comes near you, don’t miss the opportunity to go. It is really one of the most incredible things you will ever see.

Wow, where the hell have I been?!

It’s two days shy of a month since I last posted, which is an eternity online. As is probably obvious, I’ve been really busy with work and all the other interesting things that life can throw at you.

My software for work is rapidly approaching the deadline testing date, and in the world of personal programming projects I decided to completely redesign the database for the diplomacy server from scratch. I’ve learned a few things in the last couple months that illustrate some of the more fundamental errors in my previous model. I’ve also been busy trying to learn how to use the Symfony framework for PHP, as well as beginning to do some dabbling in Python and Ruby. We’ll see how that goes…

Of course the thing that’s been taking up the most of my former blogging time has been my new baby. I built him myself.

I apologize for the low quality of the photos, they are just a couple quick “post-delivery” shots I took with my cell-phone right after I had it up and running.

This was my first build, something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and I am really happy with it. Since I put it together I’ve been having a ton of fun tweaking and optimizing all of my BIOS settings, customizing my Gentoo installation, setting up the old computer as a home file and database server, and checking out the performance of my new system.

The Specs:

• Case: Thermaltake Armor Full ATX Tower (it’s really huge, but an awesome cooler with a ton of space)
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 bit X2 (dual core) 4400+ (currently at 2.2Ghz, but I haven’t even started overclocking the CPU yet)
• CPU Fan/Heatsink: Zalman CNPS7000B-CU LED (blue LED cooling fan, super quiet and takes great care of the CPU)
• Motherboard: ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
• Memory: 2GB Corsair Twin DDR Ram
• Video Card: GeForce 6800 XT 256MB Overclocked
• Sound Card: Audigy 2 ZS
• First Hard Drive: SATA Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM 74GB w/ 16MB cache
• Second Hard Drive: 3.0 GB/s SATA Western Digital Caviar 7200 RPM 250GB w/ 16MB cache
• First IDE: NEC ND-3550A 16X DVD+/-RW Burner
• Second IDE: SONY DVD-ROM 16X
• And a floppy in case I need to flash the BIOS

Since my old computer was being relegated to server duties, I took my nice Creative speakers and Westinghouse 19” LCD flat panel and gave them to my new computer. I administrate the old one through ssh and sftp (mostly because I’m too lazy to set up a standard ftp server and sshd gives me sftp for free).

Oh yeah, and I also recently discovered the joys of gaming in Linux, so that’s been distracting too.

I’ll be back with more frequent posts from now on, I promise.

If you can see this post, that means that your ISP has updated its DNS cache and you are now viewing the Ministry of Intrigue at its new home!

Everything should work for you now, but in the off chance you left me a non-spammy comment inbetween the previous post and now there is a chance that it didn’t quite survive the move. If you think that’s the case, just leave your comment again and if it is a duplicate I’ll make sure to only display the one and delete the other.

Have a good weekend!

Just so you all know, it is extremely difficult to eat a cinnamon roll and look professional at the same time. You either pick it apart and end up with frosting all over your fingers, or you attempt to bite the roll whole leaving you looking like some sort of manchild with a face smeared with sugary paste.

“Cinnamon roll! Cinnamon roll! Me likey the sweet roll!”

It’s actually pretty embarrassing.

That is all.

I apologize for the delay between posts, but I’ve been a little busy the last couple days. However, I do have a few things in the works and hopefully I’ll be able to post quite a bit tomorrow, including my review of V for Vendetta.

Stay tuned.

I haven’t posted in a few days, in part because I’ve been pretty busy, and partly because I’ve been overhauling my system with a brand new Linux distribution.

I’m now running Gentoo and I absolutely love it. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Gentoo is special flavor of Linux that gives all the control back to the user. Absolutely every detail of your environment can be optimized for your hardware and configured to your taste. In addition, Gentoo uses a brilliant and practical approach to package management: Portage. With Portage, all packages are downloaded and compiled from scratch in order to ensure compatibility with your system. Best of all, Gentoo provides an environment variable called USE, that allows you to define what options Portage should use when compiling, which allows you to avoid needing to download a lot of excess dependencies that will only bog down your system if you have no intention of using those features. For example, if I set part of my USE variable to “-gnome kde”, my software will not be compiled with any Gnome support, which is just fine by me as I hate Gnome and never use it. Only the KDE components of the package will be compiled which saves me a lot of time and space in the long run.

Of course, like all good things this flexibility comes at an intimidating price. In order to install Gentoo, you need to manually install and compile your whole system from source. Certainly a non-trivial task, and it scared me away from it for a while. I actually attempted installing Gentoo a while ago, and successfully wrote my configuration files, compiled my kernel and was able to boot successfully into my new environment. Unfortunately, the automated configure scripts for my X server were not able to identify my graphics card and after a couple days of frustration as I tried to manually write my xorg.conf file, I gave up and went back to SuSE 9.3. I had projects I was working on and couldn’t afford the time away from my graphical desktop to fiddle with it. Oh, but it haunted me.

You see, I knew that Gentoo was what I really wanted, and it frustrated me that I gave up on it. My inner geek was emasculated by my failure to complete the installation. It ate at me day after day, and I found myself idly surfing the Gentoo forums debating to try another seven hour installation process.

The final straw was when Gentoo released their graphical LiveCD installer disk. The graphical installer is still experimental as is the dialog based command line installer on the disk, which is fine as those application are designed to make the process faster NOT easier. If I hadn’t had experience with the Gentoo manual install I would have had no idea what I was doing. Now, I don’t say this to scare you all away, but I just want to make sure no one goes and downloads the LiveCD iso thinking that it will do it all for them. I cannot stress enough how important a solid understanding of the manual install process works (which you can still use the LiveCD for). The graphical installer certainly did speed up the process quite a bit, but the best part of the new LiveCD is not the installer, it’s the embedded Gnome environment with sample applications. During the long compilations I was able to browse the web, chat on Gaim and play a few games, which made the installation time fly by. In addition, if you are using the graphical installer and instruct it to install Xorg then it will copy its dynamically generated xorg.conf file to your new system configuration, which you may need to tweak later, but it will be functional.

Since then, I’ve been playing with Gentoo, adding programs and tweaking my configuration. I did have some initial trouble getting my OpenGL acceleration working, which turned out to be a hardware problem with my computer’s chipset. Simple solution: I picked up an ATI Radeon 9250 video card, which I really should have gotten a while ago anyway. I recompiled my kernel (which is really no sweat once you’ve done it once or twice and gotten past the intimidation factor), installed the new drivers from Portage and ran the configuration script. It works beautifully!

Gentoo is certainly not for weak of heart, and you have to be willing to spend some time getting it all set up. However, once it is up and running it is one of the fastest and most stable distros I have ever used. If you work for it, you will be rewarded.

Last night I was monkeying around on my computer while enjoying the David Cross comedy album Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!, and I noticed a dark shape out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see what it was and saw nothing, so I went back to my computing. A short moment later I detected the dark blur in my peripheral vision again and swung around to check and again saw nothing.

Okay, so moths move to slowly to pull this off so I’m probably just getting confused and seeing the rim of my glasses and misinterpreting it, I thought to myself.

A short moment later I saw it again, this time with an accompaning breeze striking my cheek. I turned quickly and saw that there was a panicked bat flying in circle around my apartment’s living room. I quickly ducked down and tried to evaluate the situation, dropping even farther to the floor each time the bat came my way. The first thing I could think of was that incident back in high school.

Shit, I thought, I do not want to hurt another bat tonight.

I tried to evaluate my other options. Using a blanket as a net would be too difficult and might just freak the little guy out more, there was no way to get him out the window because of the screens and as I didn’t know how he got in, I couldn’t just send him out the same way. I couldn’t call the property manager as I wasn’t sure it fell under the domain of their responsibilities and I didn’t want the bat in my apartment that long. I concluded that since the bat was flying in a panicky circle it must be looking for a way out, therefore if I can somehow get it to fly out the door I’ll just let it fly around the hallway and let the landlord deal with it tomorrow.

So I tried opening the door, but realized with the structure of the room that my holding it open from inside the apartment would increase the likelyhood that the little rodent would fly right into me. Propping it open was out of the question as I would need to be able to close it quickly once he flew out. So instead I adopted this ridiculous position. I went out into the building hallway and crouched down low on my knees pressing the palm of my hand against the inside of the door frame to keep it open. I then waited for my little friend to sense the opening by echolocation and come check it out.

Fifteen minutes passed, with the bat flying infuriating close to the door only to retreat farther back into my apartment. In the meantime, I am extrememely uncomfortable as my neighbors far down the hallway are coming and going, and while they don’t look down in my direction, it is only a matter of time as David Cross is still blaring from my computer speakers with his off-color brand of humor. At this point, the bat decides climbing up onto my verical blinds is a good idea and tries to make itself comfortable. In frustration, I picked up one of my sandals and carefully aimed it to strike the blinds hard enough to scare the bat without hurting it.

It did scare the bat. It also broke one of the blinds. I swore to myself as the bat retreated not out the door but farther back into one of the bedrooms.

Fuck, I thought, looks like I am hitting a bat tonight.

I went back into my apartment, donned my leather gloves and chose as my weapon a triangular pillow my sister brought me from Thailand. Hard enough to stun, soft enough that I may avoid injuring the little guy. I went back to my room and found him hanging from the blinds again. Once again, I tossed a sandal, although this time with far less force triggering the bats boring circle of doom.

I struck once with my death pillow and knocked him to the floor. However, as soon as I took a step he began flapping, flew confusedly at low altitude, and then resumed his flight pattern. So, I struck again with a little more force sending him sliding into my laundry. I couldn’t see him, so I assumed he must be buried. Cautiously, I approached and began peeling away clothes until I came upon him on the floor, very stunned. He tried to crawl a little ways forward and I quickly wrapped him up in an old sheet and deposited him outside the building. He appeared to be breathing, but was definately unconscious. He appeared to be uninjured, but I am no vet.

Goddammit bats! Why do you always make me hit you???

Many years ago, back when I was in high school, my three closest friends and I were called in to wage war against an opponent roughly 0.5% our size. You see, Quentin’s family had a bat that had snuck into their guest room and was trying to set up a life for itself in the shadows above the canopy bed. Naturally, his mother figured the best course of action would be to call in four sixteen-year-old boys to take care of the pest.

Unfortunately, the boys in question were a bunch of geeks.

So when we came in to inspect the situation we took turns peering above the canopy only to drop down to the floor in terror every time the bat decided to flap around the edge of the bed to intimidate us. (In our defense, I don’t think anyone actually screamed.) Realizing that this bat was crafty, we temporarily retreated in order to strategize. We realized that we were not going to be able to catch it easily without stunning it.

In short, we needed weapons.

Quickly we sorted through everything that seemed to meet our needs. One of us had a bat (not another animal, but rather a tool used by sports players), another was armed with NERF gun, I cannot remember what everyone wielded now, but I remember the secure feeling of my sword grip upon an elongated NERF dart. I remember being really irritated about not having my tennis racket on hand. Time after time, we would take turns whacking the bottom of the canopy to send the bat flying out into the room, so that we might swing wildly at it while ducking for cover.

This went on for a half hour before one of us managed to get a solid strike on the flapping rodent, knocking it to the ground. We cheered, but quickly realized we didn’t have any idea what to do with it now that it was down as it was still alive. Someone suggested trying to flush it down the toilet, but we recalled urban legends of bats clinging to the rims of toilets only to return when darkness descended upon the bowl, and rejected it. Eventually, Dan recommended taking it to the local park and letting it go in a wooded area, which appealed to our tender-hearted sensibilities now that the rush of adrenaline was gone.

We wrapped up the bat in a little towel and quickly drove down to the park and walked as far back into the trees as we could as we were afraid we would get in trouble. We set the bat on the ground, and upon inspecting realized to our horror that one of its wings was broken. Damn, this thing was done for, and we distantly considered whether there was any appropriate medical attention we could get for our former opponent. Failing that, we didn’t have the heart to kill it quickly, and instead chose to say goodbye with an apology and leave it with the repect that a fallen warrior deserves. After all, this was a bat that managed to terrify four strapping teenage boys until their adrenaline allowed them to overcome their fear and defeat him via superior weaponry.

Sometimes, I still think about that bat and I feel shitty that we hurt it so badly and as a result indirectly killed it. Which is part of the reason I had so much trouble last night, which will be detailed in Part 2.

For my drive to work this morning the temperature was -15 degrees (F) with a windchill of -30 degrees (F).

Winter must end.

That is all.